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SAP Mobile Place tool aims to simplify enterprise smartphone and tablet use

Extends Mobile Secure solution to run on HANA cloud

SAP has released its Mobile Place cloud management service, promising it will help IT managers safely configure and deploy smartphones and tablets from multiple ecosystems in enterprise environments.

SAP global vice president of mobile strategy Bill Clark told V3 that Mobile Place is a key step in the company's ongoing bid to "simplify enterprise IT", and is based on feedback from existing customers.

"One of the things we hear from customers is that an issue for administrators and end users is around enterprise systems' multiple points of configuration. If you want all the content and find all the apps IT have rolled out for you, you often have to go to multiple places, you have to go through different app stores, different portals – the list goes on," he said.

"That's why we're announcing SAP Mobile Place, based on SAP HANA. It's one place for admins and users to come to configure their mobile life."

Clark said Mobile Place is designed to help mobile device users as much as IT managers.

"With Mobile Place you'll be able to provision people with everything they need from it. For example, say you have someone new starting, with SAP Mobile Place you can provision them the exact set of mobile applications you want them to have and set up configurations for them," he explained.

"This means if you've already invested in things like, say, Fiori, you can easily set the Fiori launchpad to fit their role and have the configuration they need. You can make it so they have Fiori launchpad with all the icons, apps and shortcuts you want them to have from the very start."

Clark declined to say when Mobile Place will be available in the UK, or how much it will cost.

"We made announcements about it being available on Amazon but now its available on SAP HANA, so you can get all the benefits of having SAP Mobile Secure on top of any HANA system," said Clark.

"This means if you're in the HANA cloud you can start doing predictive analytics and look at things like how frequently sales are using their sales applications and monitor behaviour to spot potentially dangerous anomalies."